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I could say that all my 52100 are honyaki - they are monosteel blades quenched in fast oil and hardened to 62-63RC (that's after tempering).

I am not interested in shallow hardening steels, similar to white and blue steels and W2. 52100 is a deeper hardening steel, so it won't show hamon like shallow hardening do. There is a way to heat treat 52100 with a torch (like Bill Burke does it), but it takes a considerable skill to do it well and even then I would guess there would be some variations in quality. I on the other hand, am moving toward molted salts, just to get a little more performance over heat treating in a convection oven.

So in short, there will be no blades with hamon any time soon, but I will continue squeezing performance out of steels I like.

M

"All beauty that has no foundation in use, soon grows distasteful and needs continuous replacement with something new." The Shakers' saying.

Salts... absolutely no moisture on the blade, one drop of water equals molten salt everywhere from the steam release/explosion. lay your blades on top of the salt pot to preheat, and drive out moisture.

Uniform heating. When you heat treat in convection oven, the temperature inside will vary somewhat (don't listen to people who claim that temperature inside is +/- 5F the probe temperature, in an Evenheat type oven, that's BS), so to get to optimum hardness you have to do a lot of testing and adjusting before you get a good HT recipe. Salts, on the other hand (provided you don't have any frozen spots at the bottom of the tube), will show temperature more accurately and heat steel more uniformly and faster. Devin told me that advantage going salts is about 10% improvement. The process includes tempering in salts as well.

"All beauty that has no foundation in use, soon grows distasteful and needs continuous replacement with something new." The Shakers' saying.